You Don’t Know What Torture Is If You Have never Looked For an M-Pesa Message From…

Hey y’all finally Njaanuary is over or as other may call it, 61th December. Lol is there anything like that? Anyways lemme recap a little something that we do when broke. Something that puts a strain on our relationship with the famous MPESA. When broke and expecting some money, you will pretend that you are not even eager, yet your phone will remain in your hand or on your laps or right beside you. You will ‘keep yourself busy’ by checking some stuff on your phone but really, you just want to see the MPESA notification come in. You will even keep going to the MPESA messages folder to check for…I don’t even know maybe the text was sent to another app, WhatsApp maybe? When you look away, you will feel or hear an imaginary vibration and quickly check your phone to find nothing. Or when it is a real vibration, it is just a message from Safaricom alerting you that your data bundle is almost finished. Or that your usage for the day was KSH 2.00 and that if you spend KSH 171 more you will be given sijui 173 storo bonus.

You will be asking yourself why the hell the person who is meant to send you the money is taking so long. You will panic at the thought that perhaps they have forgotten, and you cannot text them to remind them to send you that money because when they told you to expect some money from them, it was just 2 minutes ago, and you don’t want to appear impatient, especially since it’s not your money. So, to jog their memory, you think of tagging them on something funny on Facebook or to ‘like’ their cover photo or retweet a tweet that is well,years old.

You will decide to take a nap while you wait for the money. You will change your ringtone settings from the vibration to a loud ring, then place your phone right next to your ear so that you can hear it when the MPESA message finally ‘arrives’. Then you will go to sleep. But you will not sleep. All you will do is listen intently and wait for a message notification with your eyes closed, lying to yourself that you are taking a nap. Then 1 minute later you will ‘wake up’ and worry that maybe they already sent the money but it went to the wrong person.

When you are broke and expecting money, the wait is torturous! To say the least.

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